,,,conservatives believe in rugged individualism, liberals believe we will do best as a community, working each of us to support all.
How the brutality of the hard-right grew in the soil of libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s writings
Thom Hartmann
May 08, 2021
Many Americans are baffled by the Republican Party's embrace of billionaire sociopath Trump and elected Republicans' willingness to overlook the death of seven Americans, including three police officers, in an attempted coup. (Particularly after they spent over 2 years and tens of millions of dollars obsessing on 4 dead Americans in Benghazi.)
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They're also wondering why Kevin McCarthy would reject Liz Cheney to embrace someone like Elise Stefanik, an apologist for the January 6 treason attempt, or go along with Mitch McConnell's attempts to sabotage the American Rescue Plan, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Family Plan.
After all, people are hurting. We're experiencing the worst pandemic in a century, and an economic downturn unmatched since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s.
Why, Americans wonder, would the GOP embrace such anti-American and nakedly brutal politics and policies?
Why would they try so hard to destroy Medicare and Social Security? Why would they mourn the loss of Trump's program to tear children from their families and throw them into cages? Why are they so enthusiastic about efforts to make it harder to vote?
Why do they continue to support Trump after he lost the House, Senate, and White House and continues to rant his anti-American, anti-democratic strongman rhetoric?
But it's not just politics; the roots of this brutal movement in today's GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and bringing a number of right-wing billionaires into the fold.
As a result, Republican policies over the past 40 years not only gutted America's middle class, but led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led. Many Americans are now so confused about how government should work that they've embraced a bizarre conspiracy theory positing Trump as a sort of messiah and politicians like McConnell and Stefanick as noble statesmen and -women.
The Libertarians
Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.
This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.
Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith's reference to the "invisible hand" that regulated trade among nations.
In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support and all other forms of "welfare," deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government's land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.
Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, "[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.
The child-killer who inspired a movement
Reagan wasn't just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand's "objectivist" view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous sociopath in 1927.
Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Today's Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand's raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, "The Fountainhead."
"It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions," he told Powers. "That book relates to … everything."
Ayn Rand's novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.
Powers added, "He [Trump]," told her that he "identified with Howard Roark, the novel's idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment."
Rand's hero Roark, in fact, "raged" so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like the plans of the person who planted bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters the night before January 6th.
Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is, "One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself."
On Trump's hero Howard Roark, she wrote that he "has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing."
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